We live at the end of the modern world because we now see the consequences of the modern reduction of the real human being to an individual. What began as a fiction to limit government has redefined more and more of human life. If human beings really believe they are merely individuals, they perversely work to empty human life of the contents that make it worth living. A life defined only by avoiding death and misery is, in fact, supremely miserable. So, today, our sophisticated individuals sometimes spend their time envying the other animals—at least they’re content. But the individual really knows that the dog’s life is not for him. The individual wrongly believes that his choice is between subhuman contentment and human unhappiness, and in his freedom he sometimes talks nostalgically about the former—the “simple life”—but still consistently chooses the latter.


-First Principles, Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism